Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The Seamus Heaney Center, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland

I grew up in Northern Ireland and now I'm giving all lovers of poetry, especially lovers of Seamus Heaney's poetry, a superb reason to visit the town of Bellaghy in County Derry, NI where he grew up if you're planning to visit Ireland. My connection to Bellaghy is that it's the town where I learned to ride a horse--unbeknownst to my father. As a 16-year-old high school student, I worked for Dad one summer when he had a contract to do road construction in Bellaghy and I used to sneak off and take lessons from a girl I'd befriended who practiced gymkhana at her home farm. All went well until Dad came back early from a meeting in Belfast (he'd warned me to show the men a good example by working hard) and caught them, including hsi foreman, watching me jumping on a gray mare very proudly. I got fired until Mum intervened but lost a day's wages as punishment.
As an aside, my youngest brother was lucky enough to have been taught by the poet's wife while at primary school, though of course he was far too young to appreciate her connection to the poet.
Behold the Seamus Heaney Centre

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About Me

I was born in Northern Ireland and came of age during The Troubles. Wrote a first novel while commuting to work as an attorney in NY. It still exists as bits and bytes on a floppy disk and will probably never get revisited because I got sick to death of the heroine after spending two years with her. So bored with her situations did I become (or was it an unwillingness to do yet another edit?), I packed her into a trunk and commenced my second novel that got published both here in the US and UK. It's called A Son Called Gabriel. To my surprise, it took on a life of its own by getting selected as an ABA BookSense Pick and becoming a finalist in a couple of literary awards. I'm now busy with my second novel, a transatlantic tale set in London and NYC, and mulling the plot for another novel.
E-MAIL: damianmcnichollvarney-AT- gmail-DOT-com